Resource-limited wireless network devices, including nodes in sensor networks, electronic tags in an RFID system, etc., have an extensive application prospective in the fields of environment monitoring, logistics, etc., and are playing a more and more important role in these fields. Since these network entities may be susceptible to attacks, including their messages being eavesdropped, tampered and falsified, the entities being captured and duplicated, etc., due to their wireless and broadcast characteristics in communication, it may be necessary to introduce authentication and message security mechanisms with a low overhead so as to guarantee the legality of these network entities, and the secrecy and integrity of their communication messages.
However the existing authentication methods are generally based upon cipher operations, and these authentication methods based upon cipher operations require the network entities to be preset with a corresponding cipher algorithm, otherwise they can not enforce any authentication protocol; and even if the network entities are preset with the cipher algorithm, then this authentication protocol being enforced may bring a calculation overhead to the network entities, for example, all the authentication methods based upon symmetric and asymmetric cipher algorithms require the network entities to perform encryption and decryption operations, which may add a resource burden to the network entities.